Hours passed.  Twilight deepened into darkness.  One by one the stars appeared; then the crescent moon rose over the wooded hill in the west, and the hunter never moved.  With his head leaning against the log he sat quiet and patient.  At midnight he whispered to the dog, and crawling from his hiding place glided stealthily up the stream.  Far ahead from the dark depths of the forest peeped the flickering light of a camp-fire.  Wetzel consumed a half hour in approaching within one hundred feet of this light.  Then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled behind a tree on top of the little ridge which had obstructed a view of the camp scene.

From this vantage point Wetzel saw a clear space surrounded by pines and hemlocks.  In the center of this glade a fire burned briskly.  Two Indians lay wrapped in their blankets, sound asleep.  Wetzel pressed the dog close to the ground, laid aside his rifle, drew his tomahawk, and lying flat on his breast commenced to work his way, inch by inch, toward the sleeping savages.  The tall ferns trembled as the hunter wormed his way among them, but there was no sound, not a snapping of a twig nor a rustling of a leaf.  The nightwind sighed softly through the pines; it blew the bright sparks from the burning logs, and fanned the embers into a red glow; it swept caressingly over the sleeping savages, but it could not warn them that another wind, the Wind-of-Death, was near at hand.

A quarter of an hour elapsed.  Nearer and nearer; slowly but surely drew the hunter.  With what wonderful patience and self-control did this cold-blooded Nemesis approach his victims!  Probably any other Indian slayer would have fired his rifle and then rushed to combat with a knife or a tomahawk.  Not so Wetzel.  He scorned to use powder.  He crept forward like a snake gliding upon its prey.  He slid one hand in front of him and pressed it down on the moss, at first gently, then firmly, and when he had secured a good hold he slowly dragged his body forward the length of his arm.  At last his dark form rose and stood over the unconscious Indians, like a minister of Doom.  The tomahawk flashed once, twice in the firelight, and the Indians, without a moan, and with a convulsive quivering and straightening of their bodies, passed from the tired sleep of nature to the eternal sleep of death.

Foregoing his usual custom of taking the scalps, Wetzel hurriedly left the glade.  He had found that the Indians were Shawnees and he had expected they were Delawares.  He knew Miller’s red comrades belonged to the latter tribe.  The presence of Shawnees so near the settlement confirmed his belief that a concerted movement was to be made on the whites in the near future.  He would not have been surprised to find the woods full of redskins.  He spent the remainder of that night close under the side of a log with the dog curled up beside him.

Next morning Wetzel ran across the trail of a white man and six Indians.  He tracked them all that day and half of the night before he again rested.  By noon of the following day he came in sight of the cliff from which Jonathan Zane had watched the sufferings of Col.  Crawford.  Wetzel now made his favorite move, a wide detour, and came up on the other side of the encampment.